this is truly insane.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/clinical-trials-begin-week-york-coronavirus-treatments-health/story?id=69817703

some clear thinking.

good.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/us-now-top-site-of-corona-infections-as-a-control-plan-emerges/

it's a time buying mechanism - it's not a vaccine and it's not a cure, and this blood is a finite resource that you can't manufacture in a lab.

but, in some way it's another argument to maximize exposure - the more immunity you develop, the more blood you can collect.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/hospitals-in-nyc-will-start-testing-therapy-using-plasma-of-those-infected/

so, you want some solidarity? 

i've got plenty of it.

and, i have a lot of it for those that are dealing with institutions that are trying to restrict their speech.

if you're old or have aids or something that's one thing.

but if you're a healthy young person then cowering in fear inside right now is literally equivalent to not going outside because you're afraid you're going to get hit by a car.

it's not clear thinking.

and, our governments are not following the science.

we need to have broader public debate on this topic, clearly, because, right now, people are just being scared into doing what they're told, and that's not a healthy situation for a democracy. people need better access to better information to make better choices, and they're just not getting it, right now.

it is times like this when it is especially important to push back against authority, and challenge censorship - and especially important to stand together in solidarity with those that are being shut down or otherwise oppressed by totalitarian governments or corporate institutions.

mr. torvalds seems to be more concerned about presenting tips about how to work from home (something he understands) than presenting his views on how to stop the coronavirus (something he probably doesn't really understand, even if his expertise in writing kernels is somewhat transferable).

that's actually probably the right answer, even if it's a difference of scale less salacious.

i mean, talk about a surreal twist of irony.

here we are in 2020 and are asking bill gates, of all people, his advice in how to stop the spread of a virus, and it's trending, and people are listening and taking it seriously.

baffling.

i still think he could have beat trump, though. and i'm really not confident that biden can...

also: bill gates is an expert on virology now, apparently?

judging from the efficacy of his flagship product in stopping the spread of viruses, i'd suggest you consider the source.

i mean, c'mon. what's the logic, here? that he's famous? that he's rich? it's the one thing everybody knows about windows: you get infected as soon as you connect.

my windows xp machines have been practicing social distancing for years, now. and, i'm about to give up on seven and move to linux...

i bet linus torvalds has a more interesting take on this. i wonder if he even supports the herd immunity line; no, hear me out, this makes some sense, because it's kind of like an open source approach. in the world of linux, we get security through transparency. and, it actually works. let me look this up....

the point i was trying to make is that i think that these covid-19 parties are a good idea and that i do support them under a few conditions.

(1) people need to be aware of the risks. there should be a bouncer at the door with a checklist that is sending away people that are old or have conditions.

(2) if you're certain you have it, you have an obligation to avoid vulnerable people, and you'd better take it seriously.

i don't want to sit in my room for the next two years; it is in my self-interest to support tactics that will help speed up this process.

so, i am in solidarity with the people organizing these parties, so long as they're following certain guidelines.

nowadays, we have a chicken pox vaccine, and if you live in every developed country except for one of them, you should have relatively easy access to a vaccine for your child.

chicken pox is also a disease with a low but substantial mortality rate amongst children, even if it's curve is more similar to covid-19 than it is to the flu, which is particularly hard on children.

i would argue that it's a better idea to vaccinate your children for chicken pox, in 2020.

however, we don't currently have a vaccine for covid-19, and we know the death rate amongst young & healthy people is on par with every day occurrences like crossing the street - it would be a risk, but it would be on par with the kind of risk that we effortlessly embrace on a day-to-day basis.

blocking an article like this is the kind of mob mentality stupidity that twitter is known for, and just another reason to stop using it. this is in fact a well reasoned article that brings up a number of questions that a large number of health experts have been articulating for quite a while, questions that we need to answer. shutting down the debate doesn't make it go away.

and, if people are not given forums to have these kinds of discussions, they will eventually take matters into their own hands.

again: the labels on the spectrum are what they are. but, as a libertarian leftist that values freedom and data, it is clear to me which side of the spectrum is ignoring science and giving into fear and authoritarian thuggery, and which is trying to follow the evidence in order to maximize freedom in the best way that it can.

here is the article:
https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/25/how-medical-chickenpox-parties-could-turn-the-tide-of-the-wuhan-virus/

& get off twitter already...

but, again - the longer it takes to ramp up the number of cases and get immunity into the general population, the longer this lockdown goes on for.

if you want this done with asap, you should be doing what you can to immunize yourself by exposing yourself, if you are confident you can beat it.

and, if you care about the old and the weak (and the fat and the stupid.), stay away from them while you're building your immunity.

# of deaths in the united states: ~1693

# of actual cases at estimated mortality of 0.1%:  1693000

and as a percentage of the population: 0.52%

# of deaths in south korea: ~150

# of actual cases at estimated mortality rate of 0.1%: 150000

and as a percentage of the population: 0.29%

this is perhaps expected, as south korea does have a universal system.

the growth rate in the united states is much higher right now.

but, if you follow what the science says about how south korea reacted to this, you should expect the small increases we've been seeing to drastically pick up fairly soon.

that said, because south korea is much smaller, both geographically and in terms of population, the challenges it faces are much less, and you probably shouldn't expect it to be quite comparable. the south koreans would have to be doing particularly badly to see these numbers stay roughly equal, and that's perhaps a pessimistic suggestion - no matter how poor their tactic, you would expect them to do a little better due to the geography, if nothing else.

but, you need to be careful about what the media tells you. 

this space exists to keep them honest, and i'll keep doing it.

population of south korea: 52 million (2017)

population of united states: 326 million  (2017)

factor: 6.3

# of known cases in south korea: ~10000.
% of population: 10000/52000000 = 0.00019 = .02%. 

# of known cases in the united states: ~100,000

% of population: 100000/326000000 = 0.00030674846 = .03%

"i'll get you next time, gadget"

no, you won't.

this is a good test case. really.

what's an empirical analysis of dr. claw's actual success rate in getting gadget? 0%. 

now, you could argue that if dr. claw tries infinitely many times to get gadget, he'll succeed eventually, so long as the actual probability is higher than 0. ok.

but, there's only a finite number of episodes.

so, what is the probability of dr. claw getting gadget this time, given that he failed n times before?

lesson: you need to be careful of statements made by authoritarian bodies.

again: you want as many people as possible to get this as quickly as possible in order to burn it out as fast as possible. you don't want this to drag on until we get a vaccine - that will lead to a higher death toll, in the end.

but, you do want to test aggressively so you can track it properly, and ensure it isn't mutating or recombining too quickly.

and, you do want to take special steps to ensure that particularly vulnerable groups are kept in strict isolation.

i know: i'm yelling at a lorentz equation. this already happened. i'm not a trafalmadorian, i can't see at all points in time. it doesn't matter anymore - we already made the mistake of not acting aggressively enough to protect the weak (and instead trying to stop the spread, so grandma can go grocery shopping on her own...the stupidity...), and we're going to see the consequences very soon.

but, the poor response in the united states may actually work out to it's benefit, in the end.

president gadget dodges another bullet, perhaps. gogo gadget corporate bailout....

current mortality rate in the united states: 1.53%

current mortality rate in south korea: 1.49%

current mortality rate in germany: 0.69%

they were slow to react, but the americans do appear to be testing, now - and they should see their mortality rate fall below south korea's within a few days.

it is of course the mortality rate that matters when talking about a pathogen like this, not the total number of cases.

now, what's the average cost per patient?

i agree that the two most important things to do right now are:

(1) keep young people away from old people

(2) cancel all religion, permanently

but, what's the use of banning visitors if you let the staff in and out?

again: what's defining the public response to this issue across the board, everywhere i look, is this tendency to pay lip service to science, while more or less discarding it in practice. and, the proper analysis of this at the end of the day is going to be that we overreacted in all of the wrong ways, and we underreacted in all of the wrong ways because we lacked the intellectual tools, collectively, to process what it means to follow what the science says.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-at-least-16-ontario-nursing-homes-have-covid-19-cases-yet-families/

if this mess with the virus goes on for a while, i'm going to find myself with some extra spending money, and i guess i'll have an opportunity to go down to a pawn shop (or maybe on ebay) and see if i can find a new system board as an access point.

i've basically decided that i shouldn't boot back into the laptop's hard drive until i'm able to do a fresh install. maybe i can parallel into the bios at some point, but if i can't reinstall then i can't use it.

i just want to stop wasting my time on this and get back to work. let's hope the new install on the 90s laptop is a stable enough workaround to let me do that for a bit.

so, i ended up spending yesterday morning trying to figure out how to get a new ip address, which turned out to be rather difficult. in the end, i decided to just turn the modem off again around 14:00 - and i got one when i finally reconnected after 13:00.

my calculation of my total bandwidth for the calendar date of the 26th would be around 650 mb. my isp is trying to tell me it was closer to 8 gb. 

i have a new ip address now, so we'll see if it tapers off today. again - i was physically disconnected for the first 13 hours of the day, so i should have exactly 0 bytes of usage over night, which i can measure from 2:00-8:00. that will at least help me understand when the ip dropped.

but, what did i do?

after i turned the modem off, i slept for the afternoon and was up a little bit before midnight. i've had to think some things through carefully, regarding what's actually going on here. what exactly are the police doing, here?

as mentioned: this started after i got a spike in electrical usage when i was gone. if changing my ip address doesn't help, it must be a cloned mac address or otherwise some kind of split in the line.

this is just relentless. they're insistent. and, i don't remotely understand the purpose. all they've managed to do over the last week is watch me try and figure out what they're doing to spy on me; when surveillance loses it's stealth, it becomes pointless. like, i know...

but, how do i adjust? what do i do?

they've tried hacking in over wireless, and i managed to mostly get around it. so, now they've apparently spliced my cable wire, and i haven't the slightest clue what they're actually doing - only that a large amount of data is moving from some unknown source to some unknown destination, and it's being assigned to my account, incorrectly.

i think i have to face the facts with this broken laptop that i keep trying to bandaid over - it's too infected, or too compromised, or too vulnerable. i keep booting back into it, and thinking i can just fix it enough to use it, but it just keeps getting worse; the more time i spend trying to bandaid over it, the more i realize just how bad it really is. the last time i booted it up, i found all kinds of scripts in the system directory of what i designated as my clean install that i'm certain were not there before, indicating that somebody has logged into my desktop and dropped all kinds of scripts into it. they must have the password. so, i decided that i'm not comfortable connecting it to the internet until i understand what's going on with the bandwidth.

i can powerwash the chromebook between uses, but i want to stop troubleshooting my computers and get back to finishing what i'm doing. this chromebook is intended strictly for traveling & emergency use and doesn't have the software i need to do any actual work on it. so, what windows machine do i not mind exposing to the storm? the 90s laptop...

i mentioned previously that i realized the 90s laptop appears to have been hijacked, but i decided i didn't care because i don't do anything on it of any interest. i just connect to youtube and watch educational films. does the government want to know about that? whatever. but, the more i looked at it, the more i realized it was more or less the same kinds of things. 

there's a difference, though - i can reinstall the 90s laptop with a winlited xp, and that's what i decided to do. but, i had to tweak it a little, so that's what i spent the morning doing.

the source for this is a physical disk, and it comes with a script that i initially wrote in 2008. this machine will not be difficult to hack, but i'm less concerned about stopping them from hacking in and more concerned about ensuring that i have a clean image i can push down to undo it.

i have no interest in getting into a hacking war. that's fucking boring. i want to work on my art, i don't want to be a hacker. and, i don't imagine i'd have the aptitude for it, either. for all my focus on math, i'm well aware that i'm starkly right-brained - i'm quite confident that i would lose a hacking war pretty badly. and, i could get taken down over the next few days more than once.

i don't care. i want to focus on my art, which means i need to have an easy way to reinstall from a stable source, and i think i've got that.

i'm going to get something to eat, and may sleep for a while. hopefully, i can get to writing that man or astroman review before midnight.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109370/

trump'd better be careful about putting troops on the border.

we still have the corpse of john candy to fling, monty python style.

....although it's maybe more about all of those south park republicans.

we shouldn't have closed the border, and the people that made that decision are responsible for any consequences resulting from it and need to be held accountable for it. that was colossally stupid....

this will blow over, of course. but, you can't be treating trump like a rational actor, and you should have figured that out years ago.

let me turn the log on and see if i get anything other than the usual stream of dropped packets.

i mean, it would be kind of stupid to ddos me.

i don't have a server running. i'm not even torrenting. my router seems to be able to handle it. it's just increasing my bandwidth.

there's nothing to knock offline. somebody would be missing the point.

yeah.

what if i'm under a denial of service attack?

and, if i am, why?

so, i quickly found the cd-r i remembered getting with the modem, but it literally just has a ten page pdf on it. useless...

i do have a chrome book here, and i should be able to log into a terminal. i don't know how much access i'll have. i'm a windows user; i'm used to being admin, i'm not used to being told i can't do things. linux has this weird hierarchy that i've always found to be sort of oppressive. but, if i can get into there from here...

have i ever done this before?

the answer is no.

i worked very briefly for fortinet, but i was really a new hire. some manager from st. louis came in one day and fired me because she didn't like my hair; she called me a "worthless musician". well, she struck me as a corporate nazi, so we can agree to dislike each other, that's fine.

but, i didn't build up the kind of experience working there that i did working for vista. i was with vista for almost a year; i didn't get through training with fortinet.

so, i have a vague idea of how to terminal into this, but....

if i can find a good sight, i should be able to figure it out. and, hopefully, it can give me better logs....

it's times like this when having all these old machines around is useful, it really is.

the best machine for me to use to try to hack into this router is the 90s laptop. let me get that swapped over.

according to the isp, i downloaded over 13 gb of data yesterday, which is obviously wrong.

my modem came with a cd-r. let's see if i can load it on the chromebook.

i also just checked my electrical, and i got my new bill with the credit on it.

the credit was $56.86. yeah. so, my balance went from $67 to $10. i knew this would work out, eventually....one more, and it's a credit rather than a balance....

if i understand the billing process, and my average bill is around $18-20 with time of use pricing worked in, then i have the following variables in my new calculation:

usage: $20

fees: $30

fees: $1

rebate: 31.8%
oesp: $45

...and my new bill is:

($20 + $30 + 1)*(1-.318) - 45 = -$10

also, this:

https://globalnews.ca/news/6723418/ontario-hydro-rates-coronavirus-covid-19/

if that cuts usage down to more like $10-15, and the fees to close to $20, i could see rebates closer to $20-25 a month for a while.

that while give me the credit i need to use my gear for free.

this is of course not very fiscally responsible, but i think we've learned that putting a price on carbon doesn't work, and doesn't actually have a point. just convert the fucking grid, already.

ontario is actually pretty good, with almost all of the generation being generated carbon-free. we should close the remaining natural gas plants immediately. but, we have no coal; it's mostly hydro & nuclear.

so, i ate very slowly, trying to avoid the issue, and have finally logged into the teksavvy account.

it's not updated, yet.

what does my modem say, though, for the evening? well, it's interesting:

wan: 718810 packets ~ 1 gb

lan: 389351 packets ~ 0.57 gb

so, i'm receiving almost twice as many packets from the internet as i'm transmitting locally. that should be wrong....

i watched a little bit of youtube, so i can handle if today is in the middle of my normal usage range - 1-2 gb, total, from the start of the day. the lan option seems more accurate, if not somewhat higher than i'd guess. we'll see what the site says.

i should get a full log for today, and we'll compare.

what if i can explain the situation by pointing to this external wan traffic? can i do any diagnostics on this modem? can i find logs?

i've been pointing out for months that it seems like somebody is trying to control my machine remotely. is this some actual proof of it, if i can get into the modem and find it? 

if i turn the modem off, and the attacker has my mac address or ip address, will their attempts to log into my machine end up as traffic logged by the isp?

i've turned the pc off for the night. i'm going to work on this, instead.

again: i wish i didn't have to do this, but i clearly do.

i mused a little about the potential of immunity to the new virus as a consequence of exposure to the previous one - they were getting partial binding from the old antibodies, so maybe getting that pile on effect would have been easier than starting from scratch. white blood cells will do that, they'll hunt in packs, and take the pathogen down like lions swarming an elephant.

(technically, they're cooperating in neutralizing open electrons. so, if the first antibody gets 10 out of 15 electrons, maybe the second antibody snags the rest. remember - this is a geometry problem first. it's a physics problem second, and a chemistry problem third. then it's a biology problem.)

so, in the end, maybe that was a factor in the slower ramp up.

but, i need to be absolutely clear when i state this: the immediate suppression, followed by the steep onset of disease, is exactly what the literature would have predicted would happen in these east asian countries, and exactly what actual experts would have warned was imminent. if you look, you can even find a few msm articles - even if they didn't get shared on social media.

so, you shouldn't be surprised or disappointed. it was both predictable and obvious; this is actually well understood.

this is why i got off facebook. it's an algorithm for the spread of ignorance. you're not immune to that because you're an enlightened liberal, or something - your shit stinks just as bad. really.

these ideas like "flattening the curve" and "singapore beat covid-19 by embracing fascism" are just the anti-vaxxer movement of the present. and, i hope you like that comparison - i hope it sinks in, and i hope it leads you to do some independent research next time, instead of just singing with the choir.

now, we need to look at what the scientists are actually saying, which is that we need to adapt.

why were cases so low in east asia (excluding that spike in south korea) to start?

because the people that live in these countries are so fearful of their governments that they evaded care until it was too late.

that's the truth.

deal with it.

the reality is that people flouting the "east asian model" are really just spouting ignorance spread by social media, and have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

guys.

listen.

the transmission of disease is a well studied topic. this is not a new field. and, the reality is that the experiments have already been done and that it's very well understood that this "east asian model" doesn't work, except maybe to slow statistics about the onset of the disease (perception, rather than reality), at the expense of a steeper curve in the end.

we could look at empirical studies, and i'll leave it up to you to look it up. i'm a logician, remember. i'm happy to present an argument. why doesn't this work?

because you just end up fucking scaring people. the context that these policies are generally employed within are authoritarian states, where if you end up in a cell, you're probably never getting out. if you think the cops in north america are scary, imagine getting arrested in a country like iran....

so, when you set up these checkpoints with armed guards with thermometers, people go out of their way to avoid them, thereby making it more difficult to control the spread of the virus.

the initial numbers look promising. "look", observers will say "we have found and isolated the cases and neutralized the problem". but, it only appears that way because the actual carriers are avoiding the checkpoints like the plague.

what the literature actually states will happen if you employ this model is that you'll get a steep curve in the end, once the effects of evasion have made themselves known. and, that is what we are seeing right now in countries like singapore and taiwan - as well, increasingly, in south korea.

i know that there were some media reports early that pointed to these countries as models, and that these reports were spread widely on social media. this spread of information over social media has consequently constructed a narrative about an east asian model, and the need to surrender individual civil rights for the benefit of collective security.

but, these reports were written in ways that are starkly ignorant of the literature on the topic, and everything that we know about how diseases transmit.

we want to be able to track disease, that is true. that means that we want people to come to the checkpoints, rather than avoid them. and that means we want to avoid scaring them, by doing things like publishing their credit card history on social media, or putting them under forced lockdown for days or weeks.

it's your governor or premier that threw you out of work.

is your governor or premier compensating you for it?

what do i think about the stimulus package in the united states?

i don't tend to oppose things like emergency loans, or research & development. but, it would appear that the package is indeed a little skimpy on help for workers.

it's not that i don't believe in class war - i do. there's a class war, and the capitalists are constantly fighting it, and workers always need to act as though they are directly in conflict with capital, even considering malatesta's critique of syndicalism.

but, my position on something like this is that the package is unbalanced - i thing the state should be funding everybody, right now.

the canadian government is in a minority parliament, but the opposition is a lame duck, and they are deciding to collaborate, instead. the balance is maybe a little better, but it's the same basic concern.

there is a big difference here, though - our health care system may actually end up mostly prepared. they're spending a lot of money on ventilators, for example. 

i'm more interested in getting this thing done with asap than i am in arguing for bigger and bigger welfare checks. and, i'm more likely to criticize local governments for overreacting than i am in criticizing the federal government for undercompensating.

cancelling church services is actually the kind of targeted action i'm calling for to protect the elderly and.....psychologically vulnerable. 

but, if donald trump is a religious demagogue, he'd be a suicide cult leader wouldn't he?

so, maybe you should go to mass, and drink the koolaid.

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/25/headlines/defying_medical_advice_trump_calls_for_return_to_normal_and_packed_churches_on_easter_sunday

no, the swedes are smart. good for them. let's hope they don't cave - and let's hope their population follows the logic.

this isn't ragnarok. you just need to follow the data...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/swedish-pm-warned-russian-roulette-covid-19-strategy-herd-immunity

we will need to see on the order of 20 million cases in canada before this starts to slow down. 

and, we will need to see on the order of 200 million in the united states.

why do i continue to cite these low statistics - 0.5% mortality rate of those infected - when the official numbers are higher than that? won't msnbc be angry with me?

because i'm statistically literate. i know better.

i think it's widely understood now that there's a lot of people evading medical attention, which was initially a point of contention, and is why it's impossible to actually stop. it's also why travel restrictions are more about the government finding a scapegoat than they are about actually reducing the spread of anything. a proper empirical analysis would be that we should stop trying to prevent this thing from spreading and spend more time adjusting to the new reality: this is here to stay, and at-risk people are going to have to change their lifestyles as a result of it. you can blame vacationers or foreigners all you want, but it's not a science-backed policy position. this thing is everywhere, and it's going to be everywhere forever.

so, you want to look at the cases that come in as a representative sample, and then build a model from that representative sample, not just take the data at face value. unfortunately, self-selection produces kind of a shitty bias.

i've suggested doing random sampling to get a real understanding of this...

most of the places where there are a lot of cases are dealing with overburdened health care systems, which means the weak cases aren't getting tested, which is producing these high morality rates. the highest rates are in italy, spain and iran, right now - over 7%. china has reduced this number quite a bit, but the fact that it still has a mortality rate much higher than 4% indicates that there are a lot of unaccounted for cases.

there are some countries that have seen very low mortality rates, as a consequence of extremely aggessive testing.

in germany, the mortality rate is 0.6% - still, even after almost 40,000 cases. austria, which directly borders the affected area in italy, has many fewer cases, but the same 0.6%.mortality rate. norway is at 0.5%, after 3000 cases, as are the australians after 2400. after less cases, but still more than 1000, the czechs are at 0.4%, luxembourg is at 0.6%, ireland is at 0.5%, chile is at 0.3% and pakistan is at 0.8%.

and the jews, who have border security that works, are outsmarting everybody at 0.2%, after 2369 cases.

these are the best health care systems in the world, clearly. but they're also the countries doing something right. but, careful - they might also be doing things that are wrong or ineffective. causality is not the same thing as correlation.

nobody else has 1000 cases yet, which seems arbitrary, but you could work this out using the central limit theorem - there is an n that is enough. i'm guesstimating 1000. other countries are nearing an n>1000, and many of them have mortality rates <0.5%, too.

but, i'm chery-picking, surely! no...

if x (i can't use fancy greek letters here. sorry.) is the true mortality rate, an example of the actual term statistic, then you'd have to estimate it being less than anything observed due to the nature of the study. if you do two hundred real-world hospital studies, x would have to be some kind of limit of the minimal values, because even in the best real-world hospital studies you're going to miss patients. if you did studies in places like dorm rooms or fitness centres, you'd overshoot the other way. so, i'm pointing out a sampling bias, here, i'm not cherry-picking the best results. if you're lucky, you'll get pretty close - but it's essentially impossible to overshoot it.

so, that would mean that the actual mortality rate is less than the 0.2% in israel, unless you think that the jews are the master race, or something. no, really, that's your argument.

so, generating a bound for x, x<0.002, means that these other countries that have mortality rates higher than that, and especially higher than 0.01, are missing a very larger number of cases, and this is likely to get worse as the cases spread. they don't know know where they are....

there's an upside to that, though.

if there are 7500 deaths in italy, and the true mortality rate is 0.1%, that would indicate that there are over 7.5 million cases in italy, right now - not the 75,000 they know about. most of these will be in the lombardy area.

the population of lombardy is 10 million people.

they may be nearing herd immunity, and that's when this slows down and stops - not in spite of their failure at containment, but because of it. 

it would also indicate that there's only 35,000 cases in canada, and we have a very long way to go before this burns itself out.

i don't know what's really going on.

but i have a bad feeling about it.

and, i suspect we might have to end this by standing up for our rights in a way we've only experienced in history books and films.

you're stuck inside.

you want to read something?

read the handmaid's tale first. i don't know if the tv show is any good, but the book is eerily relevant.

i need to eat, and then i need to fight back the anger and depression and hate and try to focus on bandaiding up this laptop as best as i can.

trying to lock down the whole world to save the weakest 0.05% was fucking stupid.

and, if you thought it was going to work, you're a fucking idiot.

the governments are going to blame it on the people for refusing to react. but, this is disingenuous, and deflective - they need to take responsibility for a failure in policy.

it's not up to the people to do what the government tells them, it's up to the government to interpret reality correctly and act intelligently to protect the people that need it.

but, we will probably learn all of the wrong lessons, and we will probably make the same mistakes again.

if they die nice and quickly, this needless economic mess should at least become an opportunity, for some. if it drags on, that won't happen.

welcome to collectivism, kids - the system where we all suffer equally, for the benefit of the weakest in the herd.

due to the tactic they've chosen, this isn't going to be over in the summer - unless we revolt.

if we stay quiet and do what we're told, it might not be over until the end of next summer.

the tactic that they've taken is going to drag this on for months. the only conceivable exit strategy is to wait for a vaccine, which will be ready in mid 2021 if we're all lucky.

so, you should probably plan around things like the 20201/2021 school year being outright cancelled.

....unless they just die quickly, so we can all move on.

so, i'm officially bored with this virus, now. 

governments across the board did everything wrong - when they should have been focusing on protecting the weak, and letting immunity build in the general population, they instead tried to turn the issue into some kind of stupid exercise in empty solidarity.

in the process, they've ruined the economy for no reason - these actions were not useful, and we're going to watch all of these old people die, reardless of how many bars we close.

now, the best we can hope for is that the weak, fat, old and stupid die quickly so the rest of us we can get on with life asap.

i'm going to be keeping usage down until i figure this out, so i'm turning this chromebook off for the night, until after midnight.

i wish i could break down the stats hourly, but teksavvy only gives you one number at the end of the day.

how can i log this? i don't know.

i know that all data through the connection should go through the router.

i connected for a few hours this morning and sent a few emails and made a few calls. i might have used 100 mb of bandwidth. max. it was probably closer to 20.

i then turned off the router, but left the modem on. we already know i'm getting bandwidth with the modem off. does it get worse if i leave the modem on, disconnected?

i turned it back on at 17:18, and my router oddly logs packets rather than bytes so i need to make a rough calculation. i just rebooted it at 17:45 to correct the clock for dst, so it's restarted again. but, there were about 30,000 packets over that roughly half hour of basically doing nothing, indicating about 60,000 packets are streaming in when it's idle.

the maximum packet size in tcp/ip is 65K, but i'm transferring over ethernet so whatever packets means, here, is much smaller. i don't know how to ask the router what packet size it's using. it's probably less than 2 K. so, a max calculation would be:

(60,000 p)*(2 kb/p)*(1 mb/1024k) ~ 120 mb/hr when it's idle, or very mild surfing.

120*24 < 3 gb. as can be seen from my stats, that is still a lot for me.

i just reset it again. so, we'll determine what the bandwidth from 18:00-00:00 is, and then start fresh tomorrow.

i'll need to spend the night experimenting with certain things in the image, mostly stopping files from loading and disabling hidden drivers.

there is one way to salvage the situation - maybe the server is a day behind. if that is true, i should expect it to come in at 0 tonight.

so, i'm going to get back to doing surgery on my laptop.

what do i do?

i don't want to open it up.

there's a large number of system files that i basically just want to delete, in order to wipe out the backdoor, but i'm going to need to try a few things, slowly, first.

i was doing well this morning in clearing it out, but i made a mistake in shutting down an svchost to clear out some authentication software. it didn't recover, and i'll have to reimage.

that may have been overkill. but, i'm going to see what happens when i try to boot with the file deleted.

we're going to do this on the pc, where concerns about backdoors are minimal.

i'd rather be doing something else, but, as we can see, i'm dealing with an escalation, here.

i may take the hard drive with me next time i go shopping.

when i've broadcast concerns, in the past, about trudeau having an authoritarian streak, i wasn't concerned about the power of the purse.

i think i've been clear that i support government spending in the best of times.

i've also received some further clarification that the divisional court in toronto is for real closed - that there is nobody in the office, phones aren't being answered, etc. it's closed, closed, closed.

*shrug*.

i have to ultimately get the judge to look at the evidence, and i don't think he actually did. it feels more like they're trying to make some kind of sophomoric point about consent - as though human rights legislation doesn't exist, and all of these clauses about filing without notice aren't meaningful.

consent is a nice idea, but it's not what our laws are written around, and i would not agree with you if you were to argue that it should be. i can come up with a thousand examples where insisting on consent is unjust, or even doesn't make any sense.

i'm suing the police for harassment - it's not a situation where consent motions are reasonable, it's a situation where i want to prosecute them as aggressively as i can. we're not in a cooperative relationship; they are my opponents, and the trial that follows will be adversarial in nature, through as many appeals as is necessary. there is no compromise at the end of this, the court must rule, and somebody will be wrong when they do. it's a civil case, but it's a rule of law issue, and the ultimate outcome i'm seeking is that charges be filed against the officer.

so, i filed a motion under 38.0.6. you can look it up. it's very specific. it doesn't require notice, and it doesn't stipulate the need for consent. it's the staff that fucked this up; all evidence suggests that the judge never saw the motion. but, the ruling is essentially that i file under s. 37 instead of s. 38, which is just sort of blatantly stupid. so, what i'm going to need to do is file a motion under s. 37 to ask the judge to comment on the validity of s. 38. and, we can do this with notice, if we wish to waste everybody's time - but, in the end, we will need to file this properly under s. 38 like i did in the first place, or not file it at all. but, if the judge won't accept the validity of s. 38.0.6 - a rule in the book - i think he has the burden of proof to explain why not. so, i'll give him some slack on his bad legal judgement because i don't think he saw the motion, but i have filed a complaint with the cjc (which has been received and is under review) for refusing to look at the data. and, we'll see what they say about that - and whether i have grounds for appeal to the divisional court, if it justifies it. if this drags on, that might be the best way to get a new judge....at the least, he's going to have to excuse himself, due to a conflict of interest, for right now.

i also filed for leave under rule 61, which asked for the consent of the court, which was required to file a document that has no specific place in the rules; there is no set of rules to follow regarding how to file a reply factum. the court instructed me to ask the parties for consent, but the issue at law is if the court consents, and not if the other parties do - the court can decide i can file if i get consent, if it wishes to evade the issue, but it doesn't change the nature of what the actual legal question here, is. and, as mentioned, it comes off as kind of sophomoric and childish.

worse is that i can get all the consent in the world, and it won't matter, because i can't legally consent, myself - i will need to present the issue to the judge and have them rule on the matter, regardless, because i am legally disabled. my consent is irrelevant, in context.

so, the immediate issue in front of the judge when this issue comes back is to have the court acknowledge that i cannot sign the legal consent form required to file a consent motion, and will need to put any and all such issues in front of a judge, to rule, due to my legally disabled status.

as mentioned repeatedly, the weak link here is the coordinator, who keeps filing everything incorrectly. i am entirely confident that i filed both of these motions correctly, but i can't do the coordinator's job for her, and if she's going to misrepresent or falsify motions then i just need to gather the evidence for the judge. this will eventually come out right, in the end.

right now, it's looking like my hearing will need to be rescheduled, and my bus ticket won't get refunded. i'd be happy to exchange it. so, i'm going to ask about extraneous conditions.

but, if i'm stuck with the ticket, i'd might as well go in with as many motions as i need to get this fixed - and i'm a lot harder to misrepresent when i'm standing in front of you.

i need to state again that the numbers in south korea - which spiked due to a religious ceremony, and then fell once that particular issue was under control - are not as good as some news reports are suggesting.

it's perhaps taken a little longer than might be expected, but the numbers are stubbornly trending higher.

if that one short-term outbreak hadn't happened, which was easy to contain, they would really look just about the same as anywhere else - just shifted a little.

it's when it starts spreading undetected that it gets hard, and that's what looks to be setting hold.

again: these tactics should fail. 

for the moment, turning the modem off doesn't accomplish anything....

i don't know if you're even in town or not, and i'm not going to write a long email, but i'm going to give you an opportunity to explain the situation.

i noticed the other day that my internet usage had gone up dramatically starting on the morning of the 13th, which was a friday. the first picture is me realizing this:

my internet usage is extremely low, because i just spend a lot of time typing, or reading the news. i don't have a cell phone. and, i'm not exaggerating when i say i haven't watched a movie or a tv show in 20 years (the last tv show i watched regularly was the xfiles when it was still on fox, and i think the last film i saw was the first lord of the rings). when i stream, it's low quality educational videos or news reports at 240 p on youtube, because my computer is too old to handle anything more than that.

so, these are tremendous spikes.

my usage is generally around 20 gb or so. february was mildly atypical and got me all the way up to 40, still much lower, but i'm going to show you january and december for examples of more typical usage:

so, i somehow downloaded more on sunday than i do in an average month.

the next thing that i checked was my hydro. is that unusually high too, all of a sudden? it's not. but, i did notice something unusual on the morning of march 13th, when the increase in usage developed:

you'll notice there was a peak around 2:00-3:00 am. i was in detroit at the time. if there was a rise in electrical when i was in a different country (something i could prove by accessing my nexus records, which indicate that i entered the united states around 7:00 on thursday night and came back at about 8:00 on friday morning), it would mean somebody must have entered the unit.

so, i have at this point put together a strong hypothesis that somebody came in here and essentially spliced the lines. how can i test this? one way would be turn the modem off, and see if can cut usage to 0.

so, i turned my modem off around 11:30 on the night of the 23rd and didn't turn it back on again until this morning. that should man my data use for the calendar date of the 24th would be exactly 0. however, i checked it when i logged in and this is what i found:

so, somehow, i used over 9 gb of total bandwidth - even though the modem was turned off.

this would indicate that somebody has installed something to my line in parallel, and for what reason or purpose i do not know. but, i have contacted my isp, and i'll need to get a tech out here to look at it.

if you can explain what happened, maybe we can skip the tech - or maybe we can make the process easier when the tech arrives, by already knowing what happened.

on first glance, it would appear as though you're just stealing my internet. but, i'm led back to thoughts about law enforcement, and left wondering what is actually going on.

the other option would be that maybe you made a mistake and put the wrong lines together (i know that mess of lines is a mess), but i would need it corrected relatively fast.

see, everything else aside, i only have a 200 gb limit on my account, on what is a $25/month internet fee. it would take a long time to download that much at 6 mbit/s, too - which is my max speed (about 100 kb/s). at an average of 9 gb/day being siphoned, 9*30=270. that is way more than my limit of 200 gb, before i even use it myself. maybe somebody thought that this wouldn't be that much and i wouldn't even notice, but the actual reality is that this is an up to 50x increase on my normal usage of less than 1 gb/day. i'm glad i caught it, because i otherwise would have ended up with an expensive bill that i can't afford to pay.

and, you know, i could have even been willing to sell you 100 gb/month for a small rent reduction - which clearly isn't enough. 

but, as of right now, there is a tech coming, and if something has been spliced, we're going to find it. if you can provide any information upfront, it could save us some time. 

for reference:

regarding the laptop...

i'm convinced somebody unscrewed it and installed a chip on the board. it's loose in places that indicate somebody took it apart. and, i'm noticing all kinds of files are running again that i thought had been deleted.

so, i'm back to square one on that.

as for the chromebook, it is powerwashed, and you can't do much better than that if you want to wipe something.

so, it's going to be a few more days before i can get back to work, unfortunately.

so, we've got a mess here, it turns out.

i turned my modem off around 11:30 or so last night - more than enough time to ensure that nothing would carry over. and, i turned it back on again around 4:30 this morning, more than enough time to make sure i didn't jump the gun. and, this is what happened:

so, even with the modem off, i have 9 gb of transfer.

the modem is physically turned off.

the only possible explanation is a spliced line. so, i'm going to have to call them to get a tech in here.

and, i'm going to send the landlord an email to ask him to fess up.

so, i cleaned up the blog up until the man or astroman? show on the 24th, and there are clear signs of intrusion, so i'm turning off the modem and reimaging a bit early.

i'll talk to you again on the 25th.

we're having some definitional issues, again, apparently, and i'll just briefly point them out and then continue to define words properly, rather than the way they're used in the backward american political spectrum.

so, conservatism is a right-wing ideology that believes in centralized power and authoritarian leadership. historically, the democrats have been the conservative party in the united states, and it is governors like gretchen whitmer and gavin newsom that are producing the most conservative reactions to the crisis.

liberalism counters conservatism by opposing centralized power and authoritarian leadership, insisting instead on individual freedom and civil rights. it argues that markets are the best way to do this. historically, the republicans have been the liberal party in the united states, but they have flirted with a kind of nihilism over much of the last hundred years that has seen them cynically move to the right of the conservative party.

what that means is that the political spectrum in the united states allows you to choose between the democrats on the right and the republicans on the far right.

what is a liberal - or a socialist - to do? they may weakly lean towards the democrats, but rarely with any conviction. but, they mostly end up disenfranchised, and forced to try and figure out which individual politicians are lesser evils, regardless of party alignment.

in the current crisis, those who are advocating stronger government powers and controls are conservatives and fall on the right of the spectrum; those that think that civil liberties are paramount and that the situation doesn't justify curtailing them are liberals and fall on the left of the spectrum.

the language produced by the media will no doubt be very confusing.

but, the political hats that i wear - hats like civil libertarian, anarchist, socialist and social liberal - are in absolute agreement: individual civil rights trump collective security, which is the statement that defines the left of the spectrum.

we'll have to see how key voting groups like young people react to this and align, in the end.

i need to get as much as i can done before 00:00, because i'm shutting down for 24 hours.

focus, jess.

i can do some offline writing....

i've been clear that i don't see any reason to think that slowing the spread of this thing is desirable - i think they should protect the elderly, and otherwise just let it run it's course.

i'm a civil libertarian, and i believe singularly in the direction of science. authoritarian government lockdowns based on flimsy evidence really aren't my cup of tea. 

this discussion is many weeks too late at this point; it's kind of hard to undo what's been done. if he eases up now, all the damage he created was essentially pointless, but you don't expect better from this guy.

they need to key in on specific groups, regardless, and they're not. if they keep up the fascist lockdowns, and they don't implement smart policy, then people are going to die, anyways. so, you'd might as well ease up. and, if they key in on the right groups, then there's no reason to make the many suffer for the benefit of the few.

this is no doubt not his reasoning, so it's a stretch to suggest i agree with him. but, i don't see the scientific justification underlying this, i think we've given into fear and unreason, and i agree it should end asap.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/politics/trump-coronavirus-15-days-social-distancing/

i've had the modem turned off all day.

no response from the isp, yet. they've indicated that they're busy. i can wait a little, but not too much.

i'm going to powerwash the chromebook, and check the other account. i'm going to try to get a few things done this evening. and, then i'm turning the modem off for the full calendar day of the 24th.

i can catch up on sleep.

the spike in electricity on the morning of the 13th is consistent with somebody messing with the chromebook. so, it seems like they came in, realized that the laptop was disassembled and fucked with the chromebook, instead.

the device is easily reset, by design.

let's hope it's that easy. but, i need to be able to prove to myself that all traffic is being directed through my own modem, and not going through some secondary path to the cop upstairs.

look at this:

that 3 gb on the 10th is about as high as it ever gets, and it's because i was watching the primary. less than 2 is the norm, and that goes back years.

clearly, something very dramatic happened to the connection on the 13th!

further, i turned it off on the 17th (i mentioned that it looked like somebody had come in here and messed with the power bar. now i get it.), and i turned it off for a while on friday to try to clear the ip, after i realized there was something on the usb key.

so, i'm turning the modem off now and taking a nap. i won't be back up until the evening.

there doesn't appear to be an accompanying increase in uploading, so i'm less concerned about surveillance. maybe that's naive. but we're shutting down for hours at a time until i can figure this out.

yeah.

you see that spike around 2:00-3:00 am?

i was in detroit, at the time.

so, it would appear there was somebody in here messing with wires when i was gone.

dear landlord/cop,

i have a 200 gb usage cap on my account, something that was dramatically increased some time ago. when i signed up for the account, it was 50 gb. i've never paid a dime in overage fees and have no intention to ever do so.

on many months, i will actually use less than 10 gb of bandwidth. because i mostly just read...really....

i used more bandwidth in the last 24 hours than i use in two months, on average.

so, the theft is obvious.

(1) i will be contacting my isp to get a clear hour-by-hour reading of data usage.

(2) i will be turning the device off when i'm not using it, and continuing to check on an hourly basis.

it is true that i have a lot of unused bandwidth to share, and i might have been willing to share up to 100 gb/month if asked nicely, and perhaps in exchange for a modest rent reduction. i have a legacy internet package that is no longer on offer, and it's a sweet deal.

but it's exceedingly minimal - very slow speeds, and a very low level of bandwidth.

if i can establish that you have in fact stolen my bandwidth, i will be seeking legal options.

"you only use 20 gb of internet a month?"

at most.

i just read....

i actually think my landlord is probably stealing my internet. but, i should start by resetting both of my devices, first, and sending an email to my isp.

there's a ridiculous mess of cables....if i can get a better understanding of what all of this bandwidth is all of a sudden, i can hopefully track it better.

and, i'll need to be turning the modem off when i'm not using it, too. if bandwidth goes up when i'm not using it, i'll know there's some kind of fork.

this is intriguing.

i just checked my bandwidth.

before march 13th, my average bandwidth was about 15-20 gb/month. it's gone up by 1000% since march 13th, when i got back from an overnight in detroit. i'm going to end up with overage charges if i don't get this under control.

my habits have not changed.

so, it seems like somebody has installed something that is increasing my bandwidth somehow. let me snoop around, and see if i can figure this out....

this is a far more promising treatment than an antibiotic.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-working-treatment-coronavirus-blood-recovered-patients-n1165231

i flipped through this study, and it doesn't present a mechanism or otherwise explain why you would use an antibiotic to treat a virus - it just suggests some kind of "synergistic effect".

i didn't think this was worth commenting on until i saw that cuomo was ordering clinical trials, and it sort of clicked.

given that most people that get this thing will clear it from their system fairly quickly, that the mortality rate is probably around 0.5%, there is a very high likelihood of false positives in a randomized trial. the reality is that you could have observed roughly equivalent results by giving them pixie dust.

so, what's going on then?

my best guess is that some drug companies are looking to cash in on this by eliminating supply of a drug that has essentially no use in the northern latitudes, and they're betting on people being too hysterical about the whole thing to think it through.

and, the more people that you prescribe this to that will beat the virus very easily on it's own, the more evidence that you'll build that it works.

as mentioned, given that 99% of people will beat this thing with absolutely no medical intervention at all, clinical trials are unlikely to produce much of anything of value, unless they're very narrowly targeted.

what you actually want to see here is a mechanism, which means you should be handing this off to those spectroscopy labs.

but, trump is apparently more interested in increasing profits for drug companies than he is in crafting any kind of serious response to this.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/22/why-trump-at-odds-with-medical-experts-over-malaria-drugs-against-covid-19/

ok, so let's double check the posts up to the man or astroman show, next....

this is a review of the debussy/ravel concert at the dso on feb 16, 2020.

when i saw la mer come up, i knew i'd be prioritizing it fairly heavily, even amidst the cold detroit winter. as it is, this day almost didn't happen - and then turned into somewhat of a catastrophe, in the end.

the dso usually does three performances of each show over the course of a weekend, sometimes starting as early as thursday but usually ending on sunday. i was hoping to make a night out of it by catching the symphony early and hitting something afterwards. initially, it seemed as though the saturday presented the best opportunity, as i would have been able to hit a local act called paint thinner after the set. i've had lukewarm reviews of the disc, but i would still like to see them live to produce a final analysis. unfortunately, paint thinner was replaced at the last minute by something that was much less interesting to me, a local punk band that i think is more or less terrible, and i ended up deciding to take advantage of a turn in the weather to hit the show on a sunny sunday afternoon instead of on a blustery saturday night. you can check out paint thinner's bandcamp site, but i suspect they're probably better live:

https://paint-thinner.com/

unfortunately, this meant i had no after show plans.

did i sleep before i went? well enough - i got a few hours, although i wonder how much i'd slept in the weeks leading up to it. i'd been complaining about strange odours from upstairs for weeks, and i'd been dealing with migraines over the previous few months, as well as complaining about feeling like i'd been drugged against my will. i was clearly dealing with some kind of environmental issue. i can, however, clarify that i was in bed after 3:00 and up around 10:00, a sufficient amount of sleep for most applications.

i made a decision to myself - i'd go to the show if i could finish the liner note package for inri022, which i got done at around 11:00. was that enough time to get to the show for 15:00? i decided i needed to get out of the house and i'd might as well try. i'd need to catch the 14:00 bus....

i was able to get out of the house just before 14:00. barely. could i catch the 14:30 bus and just make it?

moments before i left, i opened a fresh 710 ml bottle of mountain dew (for the caffeine content) and took a couple of shots of vodka, which is my normal predrink on the way out. i hit the bank machine, got some bus tickets, just caught the 14:30 bus and was in detroit around 14:45 - on track to make it worthwhile, but clearly going to miss the first set. so, i got a mike's and a pack of smokes (it's the latter i regret.) at the 7/11 and walked down to the dso to catch the performance of la mer.

i was there about 15:05, got a corona at the bar (hold the virus.) and had to catch the stravinsky set from outside, something that did not bother me much. stravinsky is something that influenced a number of artists that i deeply respect and enjoy, so i don't want to suggest that i don't realize his historical importance, even as i find a lot of the claims about the political significance of his work to be borderline comical. but, i find his work to be ugly, disjointed, obtuse, crass and broadly not very enjoyable to listen to. you're allowed to disagree with me, but i don't find this compelling. at all.

i didn't skip it on purpose, i was just late due to kind of wavering on going at all. but, i don't expect that i would have enjoyed it much. sorry.

the first piece i caught was by ravel, which seemed a little less aimless than normal. this is a lush piece, which makes it more up my alley than the wanton, aimless dissonance of stravinsky. there's a march that kicks in about halfway through that is particularly satisfying when it does. note that "ring around the roses", which is referenced shortly after the march, is actually about the plague. while i've previously criticized it for being a little bit indulgent near the end, it didn't feel that way on this day, for some reason. so, i enjoyed this, even if it wasn't the reason i showed up there on this day.

i went out for a few smokes after that, and ended up grabbing a heineken on the way back.

the first piece after the break was by poulenc, a composer i'm not familiar with, and it just kind of struck me as debussy-light. that's not to say it was awful. really, the thing about this piece is that i'm finding that i don't have much of any reaction to it at all, still. hey, i tried. it happens, sometimes.

i missed the introductory talk so i'm not going to post it here, but it is up at the dso's youtube site and the person they had come out to do it mentioned that poulenc is generally seen as being "lightweight". so, i'm perhaps not falling too far from orthodoxy in my lack of reaction to this piece, actually.

and, then there is la mer, which is one of the most widely analyzed and most important pieces in the history of western civilization, and i will reiterate that i'm not certain i have much to say about this that is important or hasn't been said; i could paraphrase some musicologist, but what's the point? you'd might as well just go to the source.

but, you should probably start by listening to it:

after the show, i had $4.00 left of the $40.00 that i brought with me and most of a pack of cigarettes, which i wanted to get rid of before i made my way home. so, i found myself walking vaguely towards the tunnel, looking for a spot to finish a beer at on my home back to canada. i think i was intending to get something at deluxx fluxx, but they weren't open yet, so i stopped at the skip instead and got a tall hamm's to sip on for a bit, as i worked through that pack of smokes that i wish i hadn't bought. i'm kind of looking around the bar for somewhere to sit...

wow man...you know, i really thought you were a girl, at first.

i decided to sit down and have a chat.

"you know, there's scenarios where gendering somebody isn't appropriate. i don't want to police your speech. but, i'd ask you to think about that in the future. you can see how i identify, clearly. so, was that necessary? what's the point? why do it?"

he seemed to react as though he'd been scolded by his mother, and it wasn't fair, because he really didn't do anything wrong.

bro, listen, i actually really did think you were a girl. seriously.

"you're still gendering me masculinely, even as you acknowledge interpreting me femininely. why?"

(his girlfriend fidgets)

it's what you are, bro.

"listen, like i say, i'm not here to police your language. you're going to say what you're going to say. i can and will react with my feet. i'd just ask you to think about it before you do it, because your oppression here is unnecessary and could be ended with a little bit of self-reflection. if it's not necessary to gender somebody, maybe you should refrain from doing it." 

whatever...bro.

"indeed. whatever..." 

i moved to the other side of the bar and left a few minutes later to catch the bus.

when i got over the border, i found myself with too many cigarettes to want to go home and enough money left for two drinks, so i stopped up the strip in windsor that i stop at and noticed somebody smoking a joint outside villain's. it's 19:20, tops. he passes me his joint, and i got to ranting a little about the symphony, i'm really very chatty in general at this point due to the pot, before i found my way back in and ordered a james ready, which is the cheapest beer available at this bar. 

i have about ten smokes left, and i'm really just passing the time until i get through most of them and am ready to get home. i figure i won't be there late.

i look around the bar, and it's pretty empty. there's the guy that smoked me, on the other side of the physical bar, and two dark skinned males sitting directly in front of me, speaking an african language. so, i found myself sitting quietly, sipping my beer, and i'm wondering - what language is that?

when one of the africans goes away from the bar, i got to chatting up the other one as to what language he's speaking. he vaguely states that it's east african, but i want something more specific than that. it's not semitic, not nilotic, and as i ask him more and more questions, trying to narrow down the area (so, it's a great lakes language?), he becomes more and more impressed with my knowledge of east african geography. i guess he doesn't meet a lot of white people that know that much about east africa, which is when i have to explain to him that i suspect i have african lineage, potentially from madagascar - but that i have a pretty good understanding of the correct geographic spread of the various indigenous african language groups from when i did a human origins project in the early-mid 00s, which had me sorting through all kinds of genetics, linguistics, biology...

he then decides he will buy me a beer, and motions to the bartender, who pauses. am i sure about that?

"well, i'm going to finish the one i've got, first. after."

and, the one i had had about 75% to go, still. she wasn't wrong to pause.

i went in and out for a few cigarettes, and when i did i left my beer on the side, but i'd say it was at least an hour before i asked for a second beer, which was indeed purchased by the person offering to purchase it. at the time, i thought nothing of this.

she asked me a second time if i was sure and i drew attention to how slowly i was drinking; she seemed to agree with my argument and handed me the second beer. if anything, i would have argued that i felt more sober when i bought the second beer than when i bought the first, because i was drinking so slowly....i would have described myself as sobering up, rather than getting more drunk.

i left my drink out several more times as i went out to finish a few more smokes, and found myself talking about such topics as exes having children with friends and how bruce lee died on set...and, then i found myself in the position i expected to eventually be in - done my second beer and without any more smokes. i did, however, have enough cash on me for a third drink and decided i'd might as well get another one before i left, although i was considering maybe seeing what was happening at phog, as i realized there may be a band there. i legitimately did not feel drunk at all at this point.

so, i went outside to see if i could bum a smoke before i ordered a third beer, and there's some kids smoking a joint around the corner. i pulled out my canned line for such situations -

"you know, i was going to ask to bum a smoke, but...."

....and, i was then handed a cigarette and the joint. i guess i'm cute or something, i don't know. trans privilege? it came with a warning though - it was strong.

and we got to talking, and they kept passing it to me. and, then they didn't want any more. so, i smoked a lot of this joint, of which i was warned was quite strong.

when i came back in after that second joint, i was no doubt quite visibly stoned, and i consequently didn't react negatively when i was denied access to a third drink. i decided instantly in my mind that, yes, i could wait to come down a little off the pot, or maybe i'd just leave and go home. so, we agreed i'd come back in a bit, although i was pretty much planning on leaving. what's next, then?

i intended to go to an empty spot of the bar and sit down and think it through, but looked up before i got there and noticed there was somebody setting up near the stage. was there somebody playing there? so i walked toward the stage and asked her if there was a band playing.

"karaoke".

of course. and, i believe that would put the time close to 22:00.

i then sat down in that empty spot for a second to think it through. did i want to stay there for a few minutes? get some change from the machine to bum smokes? buy smokes? how much cash did i have in the bank? should i go to phog?

i'm told that the next thing that happened is that i fell off the stool, but i don't remember that happening. what i remember is sitting in a different seat not far from where i sat down temporarily, and being unable to move while a woman that i don't recognize (she wasn't the bartender) hovered over me, forcing me to drink orange juice, and telling me that i look lovely - i remember her making that trip several times, and essentially being unable to do anything. i'm not sure if the orange juice helped or hindered; i know that i could not move. at all. if you had helped me up, i would have fallen down. i also distinctly recall not responding to questions, although i'm not sure if i'd have been able to or not.

eventually the woman that i don't recognize came back one last time (this was maybe the fifth time) and told me that she was going to call the police because she was worried that i was going to get raped. i remember her telling me that, and under normal circumstances that would have cleared me out pretty quickly, but i couldn't move. i had to sit there and wait.

whether it was due to the imminent threat the police posed when they arrived or due to the effects of whatever had knocked me out easing up, i was able to get up when the cops got there, but they wouldn't let me walk home. i argued the point as strongly as i could, to what was really no avail. i had no cash for a cab, i insisted (technically false). i had nobody to call (that was true, at least). i insisted i'd be fine if i just walked, and i even tried to run off, but they were having none of it. one of the bartenders had to drive me home, instead, and they got me close enough that it was a short walk back.

she couldn't believe i was 39 years old.

"you don't look it."

but, i am...

when i got inside, i was so exhausted that i couldn't even make it to bed, at first; i passed out at the bottom of the stairs for hours, before eventually crawling into bed. so, i don't know what time i got into the car at and i don't know what time i got home at, either. i wasn't able to check the time until about 7:00 am - meaning that, excluding the time it took to get me out of the bar and home, i was passed out nearly cold for roughly nine hours.

so, what happened? did i pass out from the alcohol?

well, this is what i had to drink:

- two shots of vodka in my montain dew, 1:45-2:35.

- one tall mike's hard, 2:45-3:20

- one corona, 3:20-4:00

- one heineken, 4:00-5:00

- one tall hamm's, 6:00-7:00

- two james ready, 7:30-10-ish

on an average day, this would barely be enough to get me drunk. further, let's note the type of alcohol that i was drinking - beer since after 15:00.

i suppose it's not impossible that it was the alcohol, but i'd suggest that that doesn't add up - i'm not likely to pass out for nine hours after drinking a few beers on a sunday afternoon.

is it possible that it was the marijuana, rather than the alcohol?

those that have been following this blog, or have met me in detroit, are well aware of the fact that i can sometimes experience something akin to a panic attack as a result of marijuana. after smoking pot, i have had a handful of seizure-like events that have resulted in me needing to sit down for a few minutes, or even in me temporarily losing consciousness. i suspect that i'm experiencing sudden drops in blood pressure, but i don't actually understand this - i just know it happens.

these events, however, are brief - minutes or seconds long. further, i'm good to go for the rest of the night, afterwards. they don't leave me unable to move for extended periods of time like i was on this night.

as i have a history of panic attack type green-outs, and i had just smoked a lot of marijuana before i passed out, i initially put the pieces together. it must have been the pot, obviously; i've been through this before, i was fine. i consequently got rather frustrated by the turn of events, because i know i green out, and i know i'm fine after. upon some reflection, however, that actually doesn't add up very well, either - i wasn't immediately aware of how zonked out i actually was, but piecing it together as best i can indicates the low likelihood of marijuana being the culprit.

i've held off on writing this review because i wanted to get more information about time frames in order to be absolutely certain, and i haven't been able to receive any of it quite yet. i'm going ahead with this now because this bar is....depending on how long the covid-19 fiasco goes on for, this is a bar that may not reopen at all. i may never get the answer i want.

however, i've thought it through carefully enough to rule out both alcohol and marijuana due to just how passed out i really was - nine hours! no green out is nine hours, and i'd need to be chugging a 40 of vodka to get that kind of reaction from alcohol.

regardless - how long was i out for? what time did the police show up at? what time did i get in the car at? when did i get home? these are the questions i need some help in understanding the answers to.

you have to understand that i was rather confused, and i wasn't really paying attention, but i do suspect that the bar was closed when the police showed up. i don't remember there being people around. i don't remember karoake being on. this would indicate the police probably arrived around or after 2:00 - and that, if i passed out around 22:00, that i was unable to move for around four hours.

having ruled out alcohol and marijuana, what would do that to a person?

(1) what exactly did i smoke? i was told it was "strong marijuana". i have no idea. i know i smoked a fair bit of it.
(2) you'll recall that somebody bought me a drink, and i left that drink out a few times, perhaps foolishly. the woman that was hovering over me told me she thought i was going to get raped - is that because she had concluded i'd been drugged?
(3) i have no history of diabetes, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. i get tested yearly. i'll be tested next in the first week of may.
(4) could i have had a stroke or heart attack? i have very low blood pressure. but, i'd just smoked a pack of cigarettes quite quickly, after having barely smoked at all for two months. some kind of attack due to low blood pressure is more likely than one due to high blood pressure, but something cardio-vascular related is not impossible.

i was able to get some nachos in the morning with the five dollar bill that never made it's way to a third drink.

well, it's a little slow coming, but it is at least the right choice, finally.

again, though - the first thing they closed was bars and the last thing they closed was hair salons and churches. 

do you really think this is being driven by science?

obviously, it should have been the other way around. but, i'm just happy that they shut the religious gatherings down.

if i can't go to a concert and get a beer, nobody should be allowed to go to a religious ceremony, either. that's only fair.

https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/eastern-ontario-health-unit-orders-salons-daycares-and-churches-to-close-due-to-covid-19-1.4863769

it's baffling.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/03/21/coronavirus-whitmer-updates-order-assemblies-exempt-churches-penalty/2885395001/

well, cuomo?

you gonna act or not?

i'm not losing any sleep over it.

imagine a world without old people, fat people or smokers at all. 

i don't want to get your hopes up - it's not that lethal.

imagine a world with less old people and less fat people.

less smokers, maybe, too?

hrmmn.

maybe that's not so bad.

governments that insist that we get through this together, while refusing to protect the vulnerable, are going to see a lot of dead geriatrics, and a lot of dead fat people, very soon.

this isn't an issue that we solve with cooperation and teamwork and hard work. that's the wrong model for this problem.

this is an issue where you need to look at the evidence very carefully and take steps to protect the very specific groups of people that need it. that's the right model for this problem.

and, that's the path of least resistance.

what will you do when there is no longer a path of least resistance, and people start rioting?

this is stupid.

adjust.

adapt.

do you know what's going to start happening soon, if it isn't already happening?

people are going to figure out which states are open, and they're going to go party there on weekends.

you're going to see increases in travel, increases in tourism....

do you really think the whole world is going to sit inside for the next two years to protect some fucking geriatrics from the common fucking cold?

wake the fuck up.